Let’s leave the silly ‘five per cent of GDP on defence’ stuff to the boys and their toys. They’ve got their work cut out trying to come up with a way to stop a swarm of £500 drones using £100 million intercontinental missile, a £9 billion aircraft carrier and a £200 billion nuclear arsenal without losing or going bankrupt.
Because when it comes to national security, that’s not what the grown-ups are talking about. They’re talking about the fact that the vast, vast majority of the threats to our national security have nothing at all to do with guns and bombs. Let me demonstrate.
I live in the small town of Biggar. A couple of weeks ago we awoke to – nothing. No phones. No internet. No mobile signal. Nothing. For 48 hours we had no communication with the outside world. It turns out a utilities company cut through a cable.
There was no bank, no bank machine and no way to get money. Elderly ladies stood outside waving cheque books, saying ‘but there’s money in my account, how can I buy food?’.
The answer was that local shops with regular customers either just closed or converted to a complex system of paper IOUs. The poor folks at the Coop had to try and invent an entirely new economic system on their own one Wednesday morning with no advice or support.
There was no petrol. The electric car chargers didn’t work. My house has off-street car charging but it relied on an internet handshake and wouldn’t start (though we found a workaround).
The health centre was cut off. There were no medical records, no way to refer patients. You couldn’t call them, and they had no way to call 999. Some fire alarms are hard wired to the local fire station, but I have no idea if they could summon the part-time fire fighters.
The schools had no guidance. In the insanely risk-averse world in which we live there is no way they could have completed a risk assessment (how would they have dealt with a child having a seizure?), but they opened anyway.
Thank goodness, because how would a parent deal with a seizure? At least there were people at the school who could have carried the child to the health centre.
No-one could work from home. But what was most unsettling was that in our modern, always-connected world, there was no way at all to gather information and no way to pass it on.
I could keep going. I utterly dread to think what would have happened had there been a major car accident.
The solutions to our vulnerability look an awful lot more like open source software platforms, domestic food production and walkie talkies than like aircraft carriers and fighter jets
Our society is more vulnerable and fragile than any other in human history. Our communications networks are now crucial to the basic operation of our public infrastructure. Our energy networks are open and vulnerable.
Our entire access to the global internet (the whole of the UK) comes from a handful of undersea cables. The points of failure in our modern world are too numerous to think about without starting to panic.
Once again, the boys with their toys are in the queue buying useless bombs to use against ‘the baddies’. But human error, extreme weather events, underwater earth tremors, a software ‘failure cascade’ or even some lone hacker sitting in his teenage bedroom could trigger this.
What I can promise you is that if there was a Scotland-wide outage of this sort for even a week, our social fabric would break down. A regional outage wouldn’t be much better.
And that is only one of the actual, real threats we face. The range of climate-related threats to infrastructure are proliferating. My household spent five days with no electricity (and so no phone or communications) after Storm Éowyn.
You can all get on X and debate climate change with Elon Musk to your heart’s content – today’s weather is the mildest weather of the rest of your life whether you like it or not. Our energy systems are based on flimsy cables held high in the air on sticks. It’s 1950s technology ill-suited to 21st century weather.
The threat that worries me most is that it would take only two or three years of a particular pattern of extreme weather and the world could lose very substantial proportions of its food crops. That would trigger a panic buying spree at a national level and could utterly disrupt food distribution patterns. We have no fall-back food supplies in Britain and would run out quickly.
Or perhaps it’s the fact that we are so utterly dependent on US software platforms that a hostile US Government which geoblocked them in pique at some perceived slight or other could basically bring our entire nation to its knees in hours.
And I quiver when I think about the future security risks from the fact that mass climate migration is only just beginning. It is estimated that in the next 20 or so years, 200,000 households in England will have to be relocated because of rising sea levels. That’s about ten per cent of the population of Scotland. Let’s see what that anti-immigration campaign looks like up here. Or rather, let’s not.
These and more are all real, imminent threats to our way of life in this country. A land invasion of Great Britain is fantastical, and in as far as Scotland is any kind of target for anyone it is 100 per cent to do with the fact that we host most of Europe’s nuclear weapons.
In 1,000 words it is hard even to capture a picture of these real threats, never mind offer solutions. But I can tell you this – the solutions to our vulnerability look an awful lot more like open source software platforms, domestic food production and walkie talkies than like aircraft carriers and fighter jets.
I want to see credible investment in territorial defence and the ability to contribute to global peacekeeping. But every penny we waste on the military vanity show is putting our real security at risk.